Don Grice - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Don Grice

Title: IBM chief engineer

Position: 15    Last year: Not ranked

Why? The brains behind next-gen supercomputers

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• Ray Kurzweil
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• Howard Stringer

IBM lifer Don Grice is chief engineer of Big Blue's $100m Roadrunner supercomputer at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos national laboratory.

Named after New Mexico's state bird, Roadrunner is twice as fast as the current IBM Blue Gene number one supercomputer and the first to break the petaflop barrier, meaning it is capable of performing one thousand trillion calculations per second - equivalent to the power of 100,000 laptops.

Roadrunner ensures the safety and reliability of the US's nuclear weapons stockpile, as well as enables research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.

But it's not just about sheer power and capability. Roadrunner is also one of the most cost- and energy-efficient supercomputers around, thanks to Grice's hybrid blade-based architecture.

It's this achievement that earns him an Agenda Setters nod this year.

Energy-conscious computing is the wave of the future - and Grice is the man who's bringing it to the supercomputer realm.